The 10 best Dead Island mods

Despite being slightly broken on release, Dead Island has scored legions of fans who enjoy nothing more than slaughtering zombies in its open-world island. We liked it . Thanks to a Halloween tie-in sale it's currently sitting at number five in the Steam charts, and it's already got an impressive number of mods for such a recent game.

This is partly due to it being fairly simple to mod, and partly due to bits of it not working on release. Open up its PAK files in WinRAR, then tweak certain settings with notepad to your undead heart's content. This simplicity has resulted in mods which do everything from make zombies' heads come off every time you hit them, to changing the game to make it more like Crysis.

To get started, it's a good idea to backup your Dead Island profile and save games - you'll find these in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\\91310\remote\out\profile s\default.pro and C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\\91310\remote\out\save\sa v_0.sav. Dead Island seems to have been built with modding in mind, so from here it's simply a question of extracting the necessary files to C:\Users\\Documents\DeadIsland\out. If you don't fancy getting your hands dirty you can use the Dead Island Helper to enable and disable mods.

There is one caveat - if you're playing a modded game on a VAC-enabled server, you could be banned. So make sure that you turn off VAC in the game's settings, and ensure anyone you play with has it turned off too.

With this in mind, open up your Dead Island folder and get modding.

1. Still Alive Parkour

That's Still Alive as in the song from Mirror's Edge, not the song from Portal. As you'd expect, this parkour-tastic mod adds running, jumping, regenerative health and knockdown enemy assaults. Like Mirror's Edge, Still Alive essentially turns Dead Island into a first-person driving game with legs instead of wheels, so you have to learn how to accelerate and brake without falling off cliff faces.

2. Benjamin318's Dead Island Better Resolution and Texture

Good old Benjamin318 (Did his parents really call him that? Is he the 318th in a series of Benjamins?) has upped Dead Island's slightly muddy textures to higher definitions with his Better Resolution and Texture pack . Benjamin318 points out that they're not high definition but still a vast improvement on the original, while also wondering, “WHY DOES EVERYTHING LOOK SO DAMAGED AND OLD?”

3. Amputator-Tots and Decapitator-Tots

For long-dead humans, zombies' connective tissue always seems a bit too cohesive. Fortunately, this pair of mods ensure that the zombies' limbs fly off ( Amputator ) and heads explode whenever you shoot anywhere near them ( Decapitator ). Just like they would in real life.

4. Crysis

Everyone's favourite pretty-but-shallow military sci-fi shooter gets ported to the Dead Island island with this Crysis mod . It basically turns the player character into the slightly portly monochrome Spider-Man impersonator from Crysis, complete with the ability to throw people obscene distances and break people in half with your fists.

5. George Romero

George A Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead pretty much set the tone and rules for the modern zombie - watching it is actually part of the curriculum if you're planning on becoming one of the undead. The George Romero mod aims to implicate the living dead's rules on the island of the dead, so you'll face off against slow, limping zombies who you'll have to shoot in the head.